


go so fast we don't move

by flowermasters



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: #1 sam wilson stan bucky barnes, Belligerent Sexual Tension, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Developing Relationship, Fluff and Smut, M/M, Mission Fic, Pining, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-31
Updated: 2019-08-31
Packaged: 2020-10-07 21:41:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20464076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flowermasters/pseuds/flowermasters
Summary: “You’ve caught people plenty of times before,” Bucky says. “I know. I’ve seen it.”





	go so fast we don't move

**Author's Note:**

> honestly don't know where this came from, but--enjoy!
> 
> Warnings for: sexual content, another mission fic because I'm predictable.

He’s not thinking. Sam would say this is typical of people about to jump out of a window.

He doesn’t _ have _ to think, really; his body responds to the stimuli it has been trained to respond to, with or without conscious thought. The enhanced woman lifts her hand. Her expression is set, jaw clenched, eyes hard and flinty. Bucky reacts.

“Wait,” he says, tensing. “We’re not here to hurt you, I swear.”

She doesn’t believe him, of course; he wouldn’t believe him, either. His weapon isn’t even drawn, but he looks like a threat either way, his size and shape and suit. The floor shudders threateningly under his feet, rocking him with the vigor of a child shaking a doll, only in this case the doll is him. 

The woman clenches her fist, her message clear. As tile begins to crumble under his feet, Bucky says, hand rising reflexively to his earpiece, “Sam.”

Sam’s response is lost to an almighty rumble as Bucky turns and bolts, the floor falling out from under each step he takes. The glass window shatters easily against the weight of him, and then he’s falling, flailing his arms instinctively for a split second before training kicks in and he relaxes his limbs, bending his knees slightly to minimize impact. The impact comes not in the form of hitting the ground thirty stories below but in Sam’s body colliding with his, arms and wings encaging him and bearing him forward, so that they smash through a window of another building and then crash into something hard as momentum sends them skimming over the floor.

A wall, Bucky thinks, as the protective shell created by the wings retracts. They must’ve crashed through a wall; they’re lying on the floor of another office building, surrounded by the rubble of concrete and drywall and fluffy insulation. He is aware of this and of the ringing in his ears and of Sam, of the weight of him where he’s landed right on top of Bucky. He’s heavy, especially in full gear, and being caught midair was a jarring thing, but Bucky isn’t sure what’s left him this stunned. With the amount of shit that’s been done to his body, to _ enhance _ him, to make him unstoppable, he shouldn’t be. It’s like his brain thinks he should still be in freefall, but Sam’s body is anchoring him to the floor. They’re both breathing hard, chests heaving, and Bucky stares upwards at Sam, distinctly relieved to see him intact, to see him at all, to not be a pile of broken bones right now. 

“Barnes?” Sam is saying, his mouth inches from Bucky’s face. He pushes his goggles up onto his forehead, as if that will help him see better. His voice sharpens into clarity when he gives Bucky’s cheek a little smack. “_Barnes_.”

Bucky runs his tongue over his teeth, then licks his lips; he’s covered in some kind of fine grit, either from the collapsing building next door or the concrete dust still raining down lightly from above in this one. “I’m okay,” he says. “You?”

Sam nods, the brush of his fingers lingering on Bucky’s jaw. “Yeah,” he says, and his gaze flicks, briefly, down to Bucky’s mouth. He’s so close, and he twitches closer slightly, like he’s going for it, or at least thinking about it.

_ Do it_, Bucky thinks, only that, watching Sam’s eyes watch his mouth until a loud boom brings him back to his senses. 

Sam is faster, for once; he’s already on his feet before Bucky can even sit up. Not thinking, indeed. 

Sam runs to the window they crashed through, pulls his goggles back down, and surveys the building opposite them for a second before glancing back at Bucky. “I told you I should be the one to talk to her,” is all he says before he engages the wings and leaps.

It’s what they agreed upon—that only one of them should talk to her, while the other served as backup in case she got spooked, which has apparently happened every time anyone has tried to make contact before now. Sam’s been perched on a nearby rooftop while Bucky searched the building. _ You’ll be waiting in the wings_, Bucky had said, after the perching comment, and Sam asked him to please wait until after the asscrack of dawn to make any and all puns. But then he made that face, eyes glinting and lips quirked like he was trying not to smile, and Bucky grinned at him, a shit-eating grin that made him laugh instead.

They search the building, but the woman is gone, leaving behind the remnants of a squatter’s life—a sleeping bag on the floor, some scattered food wrappers—and a huge hole that punches directly through all the way down to a pile of rubble in what was once a basement parking garage. If anyone else occupies the building, which seems likely given the area, they’ve made themselves scarce, too. They’re in a relatively abandoned part of Atlanta, an area where authorities don’t really bother to police, although a building collapse might draw some attention. Parts of the world moved on after the snap, but other parts didn’t, and Bucky and Sam have become quite well-acquainted recently with the forgotten, lawless, and downtrodden places. 

Still, they hurry through the lower floors of the unsteady building, skimming through office after abandoned office, speaking little to one another except to give terse reports via earpiece. Sam’s readouts show no signs of activity, and finally he calls it.

They reunite in the alley where they left the car, and dress down quickly, silently. Bucky waits until Sam has cranked the car to say, “So what next?”

“Back to the drawing board,” Sam says, glancing around through the windows before he puts the car in drive. “If she follows her usual MO, she’s underground by now. We’ll know where she is next time a big-ass sinkhole opens up.”

_ Maybe we should leave this one well enough alone_, Bucky thinks of saying, and he would say it if he didn’t know Sam was thinking the same. Sometimes people just don’t want to be found.

But the set of Sam’s jaw as he drives makes Bucky think he’s angry, though about what Bucky can’t be sure. Probably about the fact that they mucked this one up so bad, but possibly about what happened in the other building, on the floor. But nothing happened, and that’s what’s so goddamn fucking _ infuriating _ about working with Sam, because nothing ever happens.

Three months’ worth of motel rooms and still nothing happens. Nothing happens every time they brush past each other in too-tight quarters, sometimes with Bucky shirtless after a shower or Sam just back from a run, dewy-wet and avoiding Bucky’s gaze. Nothing happens when their knees bump under cramped diner tables and Sam gripes and Bucky resists the urge to reach under and give his thigh a little pinch, just to tease him. And now nothing happens when Bucky falls out of the sky and Sam looks at him like he wants to kiss him and then doesn’t. Either just doesn’t or doesn’t actually want to, and the fact that Bucky doesn’t know which is mildly distressing if he thinks about it too hard, so he doesn’t, just leans back against the cloth seat and says, “You’re probably right.”

Sam stops for gas on the way out of the city; the motel they chose is out of the way and thus largely deserted, either a good or very bad idea when you might be coming and going at all hours with strange persons in tow. Sam pulls up to the pump and says, “I’ll pay inside, you pump. You want anything?”

“Sandwich’d be nice,” Bucky says, as it’s half-past four already, and he hasn’t eaten since before noon, when he scarfed the slightly overripe banana he took from the fruit bowl at the front desk this morning. 

Sam nods, and they get out of the car at the same time. Bucky leans against the little car, elbow on the roof, and watches Sam cross the parking lot, the proud way he holds his head and the breadth of his shoulders and the way his ass looks in the close-fitting athletic pants he always wears under his gear. He feels a little shameful about it, and he should. Sam is his partner, probably his friend, and you don’t do that to friends. You don’t do any of the things Bucky wants to do to Sam to your friends. 

He wants these things in a vague, undefined way, hardly daring to imagine; he _ yearns_. A couple more months and he’s not sure he’ll be able to sublimate this shit anymore.

He used to be good at this sort of thing, Bucky muses as he pumps the gas. He remembers it well enough now, that time of his life, the time before the war when even though they were poor and Steve was always sick it still sort of felt, at least to Bucky, like they had the world at their fingertips. He wishes he could be that way again, wishes he could just smile and sweet-talk, call Sam _ honey, baby, darling, _the way he used to call ‘em then. Maybe if he tried it wouldn’t feel so foreign; maybe he could slip on the self that would know what to do about Sam and wear it for a while, like shrugging on an old winter coat.

Sam brings him a slightly stale turkey sandwich wrapped in clingy plastic and a Powerade, the orange kind. It’s the only one that Bucky doesn’t find to be sickly-sweet. Sam has a sandwich of his own—turkey, too—and a cola. Bucky watches him steer with one hand for entirely too long, watches the muscles in his forearm shift with every minute adjustment of the wheel, as he holds his lunch in the other.

They don’t talk, which gets progressively more bothersome, like an itch around the collar. Sam, as much as he complains when others talk too much, is rarely silent for overlong. They nearly always bicker over radio stations; Sam prefers the music he grew up with, 70s funk and soul, and Bucky is okay with anything he can tune out when he needs to, but he can’t tune out Sam’s humming and half the time doesn’t want to. They normally talk about missions and plans and their next move. Sometimes they tell stories, either skirting around talking about Steve or talking extensively about him, and joke with one another, just for fun, to pass the time. Now they sit in silence as NPR drones on, barely audible, until they reach the motel.

They leave most of their gear in the car, the better to make a quick exit. “I’m going to take a nap,” Sam says decisively, once they’ve crossed the empty parking lot and ducked into a stairwell. All the empty rooms in this son-of-a-bitch, and they got put on the second floor. “I deserve it.”

“Sure,” Bucky says.

Sam gives him a sour look. “Don’t _ sure _ me.”

“I’m being serious!”

“_Sure_,” Sam says. “You’ve got the room key.”

Bucky jiggles the knob, and the unlocked door swings open with a squeak. “Doesn’t work. Dunno if you noticed, but this place is kind of a shithole.”

Sam scoffs. “Great,” he says, looking into their dimly-lit room, at the linens still mussed on the double beds. “Good thing we don’t have anything to steal.”

Bucky steps in first, and Sam follows, shutting the door behind him. Bucky gives him a couple feet of space but watches him secure the latch high on the doorframe with a solid _ thunk_, his shoulders tense in that goddamn skin-tight compression shirt, forest green and flattering on him. 

“You’re mad at me,” Bucky says. “Listen, I’m sorry about the girl. I should’ve tried harder to talk sense into her. I’m not so good with talking to people.” Not anymore, at least.

Sam sighs, pausing for a beat before he turns to face Bucky. “You’dve been buried under all that rock if you’d stayed. Anyway, I’m not mad at you,” he says, giving Bucky a wary look as he reaches a hand out to the light switch. He flicks on the orangish overhead light in the foyer, but that still leaves the rest of the small room in dimness. The curtains are drawn; bright white sunlight peeks in around the edges, the overall effect giving the room a strange, out-of-time feel. “Well. Maybe not. Hell if I know anymore, man.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Bucky asks, in what he hopes is a mild tone.

“I don’t _ know_,” Sam says, frowning. “If I knew, I’d tell you. I think.”

“Sam,” Bucky says, “you’re not making any sense.” _ Sugar_, he wants to say, _ talk straight to me for once_.

“Oh, goddamn,” Sam says, and steps forward, takes Bucky by the shoulders, and Bucky opens his mouth to speak—_do it, just do something, I’m dying here_—and then Sam kisses him.

The feeling that washes over him is just like the feeling he got when Sam caught him; relief swelling like a balloon in his chest, his stomach still plummeting in freefall, heart pumping because he’s alive and truly, consciously glad to be, and Sam saved him. Of course Sam saved him, because Sam saves people. Sam, who tastes like Vanilla Coke and smells like concrete dust and, faintly, of Old Spice deodorant.

“You saved my life today,” Bucky says, when Sam stops kissing him in order to take in a sharp pull of air. “I haven’t thanked you for that yet.”

“The hell kind of come-on is that supposed to be,” Sam says, halfway between fondly exasperated with him and outright angry. They’re standing very close to one another, closer than they’ve ever been, at least when they didn’t have to be. “You scared the hell out of me.”

“You’ve caught people plenty of times before,” Bucky says, watching Sam’s dark eyes, the way he’s looking around all edgily, like he can’t believe he’s allowing this. _ You always caught Steve when he jumped_. “I know. I’ve seen it.”

Sam looks at him, gaze suddenly going very steady. “Every time I worry that I won’t, and this time it could’ve been you,” he says, an admission that Bucky hadn’t been expecting.

“You think too much,” is all he can manage.

“And you,” Sam says, “get on my last good nerve.”

“That’s why you like me so much,” Bucky says, and Sam laughs, genuinely incredulous, and lets Bucky back him into the door to kiss him again. _ Because you like me; you do, I know you do. _

He wants to kiss the daylights out of Sam. He wants to do it for a while, too, low and slow in a bed, and has enough goddamned idiotic hope in him to think _ maybe later_. Right now, though, he crowds Sam up against the couple feet of wall between the door and the window, ignoring the smell of musty curtains in favor of the smell of Sam, the lotion that he uses and the detergent pods he likes to buy in favor of the powder Bucky usually gets for them. When Sam grabs his shoulders again, Bucky presses up against him tight, chest to chest, and sucks on Sam’s bottom lip until Sam groans, very softly, but loud enough to be heard over the rickety _ whoosh _ of the air conditioner.

“Wanted to do this,” he confesses, after he breaks away from Sam’s mouth, but only to kiss Sam’s jaw. He doesn’t need to breathe quite as often as Sam does. “For a couple months now.”

“Don’t make this weird, Barnes,” Sam says, aiming for sarcastic and missing the mark thanks to the way his breath hitches when Bucky sucks on his earlobe. He reaches up and runs his hand over the back of Bucky’s skull, fingers carding ungently through newly-shorn hair. Bucky cut it not long ago, thinking even then of how he once would’ve been and wondering if he could align all of his selves or if he’d already done it somewhere along the way without realizing. Sam had said _ you look good, man_, and then took one look at the back and said, _ give me the clippers_.

Sam lets his arm fall, hand skimming down to touch Bucky’s hip lightly, but with intention. He eases Bucky even closer somehow, so that their hips are flush, Bucky’s Goodwill Levi’s against Sam’s Under Armour. He rocks his hips and grins when Bucky groans.

It’s so much easier than he thought it would be to skim a hand up under Sam’s shirt, his real hand, easy to feel Sam shiver. Sam’s beard rasps against his skin, against the stubble on his own jaw. Bucky needs a shave, but he doesn’t hear any complaints now. 

When Sam bites down on his neck, then licks the mark with the flat of a hot tongue, Bucky grunts and shoves his hand into Sam’s pants, a bit unceremoniously given how much he’s thought about this moment—always in the abstract, sure, but at length, definitely.

“Jesus, you don’t fuck around,” Sam says, but he’s swelling to fill Bucky’s hand, and he doesn’t sound angry about it.

“Sorry, baby,” Bucky says, distracted by the way Sam moves his hand to the zipper of his jeans. 

A bit of finagling and Sam lets Bucky take them both in hand, his head thumping back against the door briefly, teeth worrying at his lower lip. It’s not gonna take too long, Bucky suspects, for either of them. Certainly not for him.

He mumbles mindless shit in Sam’s ear, none of it very suave; _ you been holding out on me_, and _ I’m sorry I scared you. _ Sam’s hand has made it back to Bucky’s hair and is now clenching tight at the nape of his neck, the tug there strangely even more pleasurable than Bucky’s hand on their dicks. Bucky is flushed hot all over, feels anchored to the spot, never wants to move from it, wonders if Sam’s feeling it, too.

“I wanna fuck you,” Bucky says, “you gonna let me do it sometime, huh?”

“Shut _ up_,” Sam pants, and Bucky winces and comes a moment later for the look on Sam’s face, overwhelmed and sort of helplessly turned-on, big brown eyes wide. Sam comes just as Bucky starts to get oversensitive, but he keeps going until Sam moans under his breath and grabs gently at his wrist to still his hand.

Bucky leans on Sam a bit, pressing him up against the door and ducking his head so he can rest his chin on Sam’s shoulder for a moment. Sam allows this, letting go of Bucky’s hair and instead resting his palm on the back of Bucky’s neck, strangely soothing. “You’re sticky,” he says, amused, and Bucky’s not sure if he means from sweat or come or what.

“Yeah, I need a shower,” Bucky mumbles, still not moving, not really inclined to with his feet safely on the ground. He's still covered in dust. A beat, and then: “How’re those nerves of yours now?”

Sam laughs. “They’ll recover,” he says, “provided you don’t do anything reckless any time soon.” He squeezes Bucky’s neck fondly, so that Bucky knows he’s teasing, even if the sentiment rings true.


End file.
